Benedikt Ledebur

There’s nothing behind it. Andy Warhol

Nature is a product of and discourse. Nelson Goodman

Let the atrocious images haunt us. Susan Sontag

The paradox of the real in art

A first attempt at a rational linguistic distinction of the real that separates the determination of characteristics from the absence of this determination—this being an attempt to assign the real to another space other than the reality in which it currently exists, which one might suspect is only a construct—is the same as the distinction between the representational and the nonrepresentational. This ex negativo concept of the real would fall into the latter category, as it is the coded , the characteristic-filtering , and the eyes schooled by the conventions of seeing and the desire for categories that give any form of realism the ability to deceive us with its temporal and stylistic artificiality. Either from a Kantian concept of a fundamentally unapproachable reality or from the constructivist view of artificiality that is void any reality whatsoever, if when looking at something the viewer takes into consideration the means of viewing, the methods, or the experimentation, then the real is often seen as precisely the area that is able to elude the symbols created by both the sciences as well as art, even though the real provides the very inspirations for all of the insights, discoveries, and inventions that they create.

Zeuxis and Parrhasius

The degree to which discussions and theories about art are anthropocentric is illustrated by the number of references to the classical stories of Zeuxis and Parrhasius in their competition to create the most convincing . To this day, Zeuxis, who was able to fool his rival with a painted curtain that appeared to cover the behind it, is still considered the winner of the contest, even though Parrhasius’s two-dimensional painting of grapes was “real” enough to fool the birds. Even if we know that, from an analytical and scientific understanding of a bird’s cognitive abilities, its sense of vision is a much simpler mechanism than that of a human being, it is clear that when viewed from a synthetic artistic point of view, visual representations must offer much more before they could fool an animal. A further discussion of this anecdote, which focuses even more closely on the example of the bird, is offered by Jacques Lacan when he speaks of the “natural function of the lure and that of trompe-l’oeil.” “If the birds rushed to the surface on which Zeuxis had deposited his dabs of color, taking the picture for edible grapes, let us observe that the success of such an undertaking does not imply in the least that the grapes were admirably reproduced, like those we can see in the basket held by Caravaggio’s Bacchus in the Uffizi. If the grapes had been painted in this way, it is not very likely that the birds would have been deceived, for why should the birds see grapes portrayed with such extraordinary verisimilitude? There would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign, in something representing grapes for the birds. But the opposite example of Parrhasios makes it clear that if one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil, that is to say, something that incites him to ask what is behind it.”#1# It is interesting to note that Lacan links the concepts of “reduced” with “sign” in order to indicate that the painting could be “of importance” to the brain of a bird. It would seem just as plausible to deny that two-dimensional representations are capable of fooling birds and instead state that only three-dimensional images are able to produce the perfect illusion—one that can even draw the eye of an animal in search of prey.

Brunelleschi’s Mirror Experiment and the Fixed Lens

The historical relativity of human is illustrated by a further, oft-cited experiment performed by the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425, which—in addition to Erwin Panofsky or, more recently, Jean-Francois Lyotard#2#—was introduced into the debate by Paul Feyerabend in Wissenschaft als Kunst #3#.

Brunelleschi painted the exterior view of the San Giovani Baptistry in Florence on a polished mirror background. In the middle of the painting, he drilled a small hole through which the viewer could comfortably view what was located behind. To conduct the experiment, the viewer stood on the spot from where the painting was originally made—in this case, the entrance of the Florence cathedral—and held the painting up to a particular height. The viewer then looked through the hole in the back of the painting at a mirror held at a distance that represented the distance from the viewer to the baptistry on a smaller scale. The viewer not only saw the reflected image of the painted baptistry in the mirror, but also the twice- reflected image of the natural sky. Thanks to the double mirror-image, the clouds which the viewer saw reflected in the mirror—as long as there were any to be seen and there was sufficient wind to make them move—moved in the same direction as those that one would see were he or she to look directly at the baptistry when the mirror was taken away. Brunelleschi wanted to prove that the eye could be deceived to such a degree that the viewer was no longer capable of distinguishing between art and reality. In Della pittura , offers another version of the theory—a version that would soon be confronted with its first critics. “Alberti had adopted one of Euclid’s principles: ‘If the angle which the eye views is smaller, then the thing that is seen appears smaller.’ According to Kepler and Descartes, this principle played an important role in Western optics. In modern terms, this represents the equation of the field of vision and the optical/physical . [...] The painter, however, does not paint for one-eyed individuals with their heads fixed in place, but instead paints for people who are able to move about in front of the painting. If this painting is also capable of appearing natural and free of distortion, then there must be other laws that govern the phenomenon.”#4#

An even greater paradigmatic model than Brunelleschi’s double-mirrored, illusory reflection is represented by the camera obscura, which not only offers a model for the human eye—and an objective form of seeing—but also for the photographic lens. Again we are dealing with a small hole, but in this instance the waves of light reflected in the mirror do not shine though the hole into the eye of the viewer. In the camera obscura the light shines through the hole and is projected into a dark room, causing a reversed image ti appear on the opposite wall. In his essay “Modernizing Vision” (1988)#5#, Jonathan Crary criticizes notions of a continuous development that begins with the camera obscura as a “central epistimological figure” and ends with the photgraphic camera. Like Paul Feyerabend, Crary focuses on the monocularity of the underlying model: “The aperture of the camera corresponds to a single mathematically definable point from which the world could be logically deduced and represented. [...] Sensory that depended in any way on the body was rejected in favor of the representations of this mechanical and monocular apparatus, whose authenticity was placed beyond doubt. [...] A monocular model, on the other hand, precluded the difficult problem of having to reconcile the dissimilar and therefore provisional and tentative images presented to each eye.”#6# Crary succeeds in showing how the nineteenth-century static model of geometrical optics—in which the observer is equated with a single point of view—was replaced with the notion of seeing as an interplay of stimuli and physical processes that are dependent on time. Cracy his ideas are supported by the ideas set forth in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things . Foucault applies the break that occured between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to do away with old, categorically fixed systems of representation. In its place, he offers “archeological” excavations of natural history, general grammar, and economic value systems that attempt to bring about a historical deconstruction of encyclopedic .

Representation and Malcolm Morley’s grid

In The Order of Things , Foucault offers a swan song for these systems of representation and begins with an excellent analysis of Velazquez’s Las Meninas [The Maids of Honor]. Even when the reality of the scene—particularly the manner in which it employs Brunelleschi’s mirror construction and the camera obscura—is replaced by the reflexivity of the two- dimensional symbolic image space, something still remains of the scene’s structure. It is almost as if the scene is wrapped in the inverse light of the camera obscura, in that the light “by flooding the scene (I mean the room as well as the canvas, the room represented by the canvas, and the room in which the canvas stands), envelops the figures and the spectators and carries them with it, under the painter’s gaze, towards the place where his brush will represent them.”#7# And in the place where Velazquez stood when he painted the image—and where we as the observer also find ourselves standing—we now see the figures of the royal couple reflected in the mirror at the back of the image, and it is this image that the painter depicted in the painting appears to be painting. When Thomas Struth photographed the room in front of Velazquez’s painting for his series of museum photographs ( Museo del Prado 7, Madrid 2005 ), he shifted the angle of view. Velazquez’s painting is located in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, and a group of girls in their school uniforms with stockings and checkered skirts stands in front of the painting. Here one image space steeped in history comments on another and, simultaneously, broaches the issue of not only the relationship between photography and painting, but also the interaction of art and its (non)reception in the museum.

Malcolm Morley also addresses a different form of reflexivity in his painting of a poster reproduction of Jan Vermeer’s The Art of Painting . Whereas in Struth’s photograph, the painted mirror serves to expand the image space of the painting as well as that of the photograph, Morley spans a grid-based reproduction of the photograph between the two painted images as if it were a color filter. Not quite as refined as Velazquez’s painting, in which the observers eyes meet with those of the painter in the painting, in Vermeer’s The Art of Painting the viewer looks in the same direction as the depicted painter with his back to the viewer and has an unobstructed view of his model. The pictorial space in Vermeer’s painting, as is usually the case in his works, is lit from the left as well as the background—in Velazquez’s Las Meninas the light falls from the right foreground. As opposed to Velazquez’s dark hints of hanging on the wall, Vermeer forces the picture hanging on the wall out of the darkness, and the viewer can clearly see a topographic map of the Netherlands from 1581. While Velazquez chose to show the reverse side of a canvas, the left- hand side of Vermeer’s painting includes a heavy curtain that has been drawn back—thus conjuring up the unbroken, classical notion of representation and realism—and the masks lying on the table serve as the symbols of mimesis. Here, too, a system of representation is brought to the fore according to which the topographical map can also be considered a paradigm—a paradigm which Jean Baudrillard dismisses at the very beginning of his book Simulation and Simulacra. Baudrillard begins with Jorge Luis Borges’s tale of a map that covers the entire territory that it depicts and comes to the following #conclusion: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory [...] It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.”#8# When Morley places a grid before the original and turns it 180 degrees, he distorts the design of the overall impression of perception and instead merely transfers the individual sections made up of simple color relationships, it is as if he were offering up an obliging illustration of Baudrillard’s cartographic . Admittedly, Morley’s application of acrylic paint to the surface coarsens the representation of the original, the fact that he was painting from a four-color-print poster can be seen on the edges of the figures and even more clearly in the black and white tiles that make up the studio floor. Jean Claude Lebenstzeijn notes that Morley actually preferred another name for his of painting than Hyperrealism or Photorealism: “Post-Pop? Radical Realism? Sharp-Focus Realism? Photographic Realism? Ektachromism? In France and other countries, ‘Hyperrealism’ became the catchword, while in the ‘Photo-Realism’ took hold. Morley didn’t like this term […]. He chose ‘Superrealism’ for himself (Mondrian had already used the phrase ‘Superrealist art’ in 1930); later, perhaps to maintain his distance, he spoke of ‘fidelity paintings.’”#9#

Morley’s painting Race Track (1970), a transfer of a poster for a South African travel agency, shows a racecourse. By applying a monotype-like, printed letter X, which simultaneously serves to cancel his reproduction of the original, Morley breaks with his own style of superrealist painting. During this phase of his work, Morley’s interventions became ever more drastic—some of them even take place at the illusory level of the image itself. Here the original is shown as crumpled and torn, but Morley also manipulates the canvas itself, by punching a hole in it with a knife, for example (Disaster, 1972–1974). Yet performance and collage (or assemblage) make ever clearer precisely that which the meticulous painting of Hyperrealism and the serial production of Pop art tend to forget: The original—photograph, poster, book cover, soup can, or Brillo box—is the ready-made that already exists from the very onset of these artistic processes and genres.

Photographic Realism under the banner of clipped indexicality

In the Neue Gallerie on the ground floor of the 1972 documenta 5, curated by Harald Szeemann, in Kassel, Germany, a number of painters were exhibited who the organizers described as belonging to the genre of “Photographic Realism.” These included Jasper Johns, Richard Artschwager, Chuck Close, Gerhard Richter, Ralph Goings, Duane Hanson, Franz Gertsch, Malcolm Morley, and others. Their inclusion in the exhibition also served to assert the validity of this new style. In the catalogue for the documenta 5, Jean Christophe Ammann listed the six criteria that characterize the genre:

a) As is true of Richter’s work, a photograph or a slide almost always serves as a model. b) The traditional composition is replaced by a photograph of the original projected on the canvas. c) All hand-painted characteristics fall away completely. d) The painted images are a precise match of the original. e) The motifs generally come from the artists’ surroundings and every-day life. f) The underlying photograph is not merely an aid, but instead serves as the starting point for the painting of a photograph. According to Richter’s radical formulation, “The photograph is not an aid in the painting process. Painting is rather an aid for producing a photograph made by painting.”#10# Although the formulation of such criteria is at the same time both bold and useful, the very nature of the language in which they were formulated means that they do not stand up to close scrutiny. For example, just how precise is “precise” when it comes to a style of painting? Even Morley’s grid method, which is as close as it comes to a direct transfer of the original, not only illustrates the varying degrees of exactness, but is also evidence of how a coarse brush stroke can and does result in creative gesture. This must be true of any style of painting that usurps the original by replacing the original with an image projected directly onto the canvas.

The fixation on the use of a photograph as a model also has a further advantage, as photographs do not only represent a historical intervention among the possible forms of representation. If we view them as symbols, they form the ideal object for a discussion of the status of representation versus symbol. Charles S. Peirce divides these classes of symbols into the iconic (which are distinguished by their similarity to the original), the indexical (for their cause-effect relationship—smoke and fire, for example), and the symbolic (which employ conventions to refer to their originals). According to Peirce, photographs belong to the indexical class of symbols. Roland Barthes follows in the same vein when he deems the ability of the photographic paper to react to light of greater importance than all of the means with which the photographer can manipulate the photographic image. According to Barthes, this is true of not only the means by which one can affect development in the dark room, but also the positioning of the camera, the choice of lens, the angle, exposure, depth of field, f- stop, et cetera. Barthes comes to the conclusion that it is not art or communication, but rather photography’s referential role that forms its basic underlying principal. The fact that in the digital age photographs can be reproduced, made available, and manipulated on computers making it an even less trustworthy medium of documentation than photography in the age of retouching does nothing to alter the plausibility of these views. Whereas the camera obscura and photographic camera were once used as models for the human eye—the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz even believed that the technical deficiencies of the eye (blind spot, chromatic dispersion, vascular shadows, etc.) made it inferior to these devices. Today, the digital coding and processing of images based on electronic impulses is used as a model of vision, although this model does not take into consideration the differences in depth and organization. Therefore, digital means of image manipulation actually serve to shed light on the boundaries that Barthes attempts to impose between art and photography. His reflections published in Camera Lucida draw upon family snapshots and historical photographs. Barthes uses the terms “studium” (knowledge) and “punctum” (pleasing detail) to describe what is mainly his own reaction to the photographs at issue, whereby the “punctum” could be understood as the embodiment of the real that may have initially awoken his interest in the image. However, in his essay “A Short History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin points out that it is knowledge that allows us to read the photograph. Knowledge serves to decode the photograph and render it recognizable as a historical index. The American art theoretician Rosalind E. Kraus attempts to establish indexicality as a new art paradigm. She introduces linguistics and Lacan into the debate and—like her fellow campaigners Hal Forster and Benjamin Buchloh—seeks to distance herself from the previous generation of theorists’ formalistic understanding of . In her examination of indexicality in Notes on the Index I + II, Kraus begins with artistic photography (Man Ray) and compares these physical impressions of light with the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, which for her represent the true shift in paradigm from subjective works of art—which are really never free of the artist’s expressivity—to an objective form of art. In light of the variety of art that was produced in the 1970s, Krauss asks herself: “But is the absence of a collective style the token of a real difference? Or is there something else for which all these terms are possible manifestations?”#11# Based on her examination of Vito Acconci’s video project Airtime (1973)—in which the artist engages in a dialogue with his own mirror image, which he sometimes addresses as “You”—Krauss introduces Jakobson’s linguistic category of the “shifter,” a category to which the personal pronouns belong, as these can shift in meaning and even be deemed “empty,” thus allowing for them to be alternately appropriated by the speaker. Acconci’s work also offers Krauss the opportunity to introduce Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage,” a stage which infants enter into between the ages of six and eighteen months. The identification with something which at first appears to exist externally is, according to Lacan, the root of the imaginary. On the other hand, the acquisition of language, confronted with preexisting basic frameworks and, thus, a historic dimension, is seen as the basis for all that is symbolic. In order to learn the meaning of the symbolic when confronting his or her own mirror image, the infant requires a third person to help in the identification process for triangulation to occur. This third person helps the infant to differentiate between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, which corresponds to the image, the significant, and the signified.

In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster speaks of a Lacanian “shift” that characterizes contemporary art, a shift which Foster believes can particularly be seen in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. He divides this concept along the lines of the three schemas that Lacan introduces in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The first schema, “Object/Image/Geometral Point,” is “to remind you in three terms of the optics used in this operational montage that bears witness to the inverted use of perspective, [...]”#12#

According to Lacan’s visual model, the reverse of this model shows how the viewer is exposed to the gaze of the object and himself becomes an image. Foster assigns this position to the film stills that made up the early works of Cindy Sherman: “In the early work of 1975– 1982, from the film stills through the rear projections to the centerfolds and the color tests, Sherman evokes the subject under the gaze, the subject-as-picture. [...] Her subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze.”#13# Lacan’s second schema, “Point of Light/Screen/Picture,” allows the subject, protected by the screen, at the point of the image to perceive the object at the point of light without it being effected and, thus, avoid being blinded by the real. As shown in Lacan’s illustration, which shows two concentric circles, the screen covers the center. Referring back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in which the author discusses experiments with light and glare in which a small screen was used to make the objects hidden by the light visible again, Lacan declares: “[I]n its relation to desire, reality appears only as marginal.”#14# Foster believes this applies to the middle phase of Sherman’s work (1987–90)—fashion photographs, fairytale illustrations, art history portraits, and disaster pictures. He never truly does succeed in separating the first phase from the second (except in terms of time), perhaps in part because it is unclear exactly what he means by “moves to the image screen, to its repertoire of representations.”

Lacan’s third schema is an overlapping of the first two. In the middle we now have Image and Screen, to the right the Subject of Representation, and to the left the gaze. “Only the subject— the human subject, the subject of the desire that is the essence of man—is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this manner of imaginary capture. [...] In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation.”#15# This play with the mask is intended to hold off the gaze, which seems, when one hears Lacan describing it, evil and dangerous, an analogy for the covetous, greedy eye. According to Lacan, the screen is there to tame the gaze, to force it to lay down its arms. If the mediation fails, the screen tears apart, and the real appears as a chaotic and formless. Foster also seeks to link Pop Art, which he believes is a descendant of Surrealism, such as Warhol’s Disaster series to Lacan’s trauma theory and Barthes’s “punctum.” Warhol’s silk screens are particularly capable of breaking through the Lacanian screen. Furthermore, Foster believes artists such as Duane Hanson or John de Andrea have taken the illusion of artificiality to such lengths that they begin to touch upon the real: “This art does intentionally what some superrealist art did inadvertently, which is to push illusionism to the point of the real. Here illusionism is employed not to cover up the real with simulacral surfaces but to uncover it in uncanny things …” Yet Foster sets this strategy aside in favor of another that offers a more direct path to the goal: “The second approach runs opposite to the first but to the same end: it rejects illusionism, indeed any sublimation of the object-gaze, in an attempt to evoke the real as such.”#16# Foster believes that Sherman’s works fall under this . He does realize the unavoidable danger is that here conventions and, thus, a formal language also begin to emerge, particular in terms of a “coded expressionism,” but he does not doubt that the possibility of unveiling the real remains.

In Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Michael Fried describes “a vast critical literature on Sherman’s work, much of it in my opinion theoretically overblown.” He believes Sherman’s film stills represent the realization of his notion of the anti-theatrical in art that he developed in “Art and Objecthood”: “[B]y her own account, despite the fact that she was in effect ‘performing’ for the camera [...] Sherman at the same time felt impelled to avoid displays of emotion and by implication entire scenes that might strike the viewer as theatrical in the pejorative sense of the term.”#17# As the title of the book implies, Fried—as opposed to Barthes—has no qualms with photography as works of art that are framed and hung on the wall as “tableaus” (Indeed, he even compares such works with the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings).#18# He believes they like Sherman’s stills are derived from the genre of film, which has also inspired the works of Hiroshi Sugimoto or Jeff Wall (in his catalogue raisonné, Wall distinguishes between his “documentary” and “cinematographic” photographs). Fried believes that the increasing presence of art photography has caused many of his notions concerning the relationship between realism and modernism to resurface. He dedicates an entire chapter to Barthes’s “punctum,” which according to Barthes can only be expected to arise in unstaged photographic scenes. Fried believes his “chief critical text “Art and Objecthood” is in complete agreement with Barthes’s “little book.” He links the “punctum” to Marcel Proust’s notion of sensory that are capable of spontaneously invoking memories, although—or precisely because—Barthes denies that this relationship arises when looking at a photograph. The viewer wants to be drawn in by the fact that the events in the photograph actually took place, not by the memories the photograph may evoke. Likewise, Fried believes Thomas Demand’s photographs are “satiated” with the artist’s intentions. In Demand’s case, the necessary preconditions are met by the fact that the true artworks are not the scenes which the artist has himself staged but the photographs which depict them. For Fried, the fixation of models and lighting on the two-dimensional surface of photographic paper is enough to ensure that nothing more is left to chance. What remains unclear is why such scenes could not just as well be removed from their real-world context (by means of scale or a pedestal in a museum, for example), which would allow them to even more closely resemble their three-dimensional existence in the real world (which would of course pose problems for sculptural art).

Conventions from the of language under the sign of the symbol

In America in the 1970s, a critical form of art theory arose out of the . This theory is based on the premise that it is fundamentally impossible for art to give rise to the real. In After the End of Art, Arthur C. Danto wrote: “Modernism came to an end when the dilemma recognized by Green berg between works of art and mere real objects could no longer be articulated in visual terms, and when it became imperative to quit a materialist in favor of an aesthetics of meaning. This, again in my view, came with the advent of pop.”#19# Danto may attribute modernism with a materialist aesthetic that in some ways established the monochrome image as an “image object” that represents nothing more than that which it is—a development which reached its peak in the ready-made. Yet without addressing the need to examine the art industry’s and the institutions’ inherent power to define, Danto believes the boundary between art and reality has been crossed or even broken down entirely. However, Danto does not describe how reality is able to draw these boundaries, but this is precisely what the works that he describes as having a materialistic aesthetic attempt to render visible.

In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman takes a different track in addressing this similarity. When Goodman denies the existence of the function which symbols use to refer to their originals, he denies the existence of one of Peirce’s entire class of symbols. “The plain fact is that a picture, to represent an object, must be a symbol for it, stand for it, refer to it; and that no degree of resemblance is sufficient to establish the requisite relationship of reference. [...] ‘To make a faithful picture, come as close as possible to copying the object just as it is.’ This simple-minded injunction baffles me; for the object before me is a man, a swarm of atoms, a complex of cells, a fiddler, a friend, a fool, and much more. [...] If none of these constitute the object as it is, what else might? If all are ways the object is, then none is the way the object is. I cannot copy all these at once; and the more nearly I succeeded, the less would the result be a realistic picture.”#20# Reflections over the means by which the signifier can refer to the triad of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic must take place within the historically and culturally predetermined sphere of the symbolic. Yet as a of language, Goodman supposes a further limitation: of Peirce’s classes of signs—icon, index, and symbol— Goodman grants validity only to the latter, although he does believe convention could lead all of them be made to mean something else. That is to say, when they are not specifically used to refer to works of art, but instead their meaning comes by means of definition (norms) or habit. It is interesting to note that this fixation on linguistic meaning entails a form of categorical essentialism—Goodman’s argumentation presupposes knowledge of the perceived being (swarm of atoms, complex of cells, etc.). In this respect, the discussion concerning representation and the original take on a whole new direction—one that goes beyond phenomenological notions concerning the continuity of the surface, for example.

Erwin Panofsky had already described the linear perspective as a symbolic system. “For the structure of an infinite, unchanging and homogeneous space—in short, a purely mathematical space—is quite unlike the structure of psychophysiological space.”#21# Goodman pokes at the notion that perspective representations are the same as the perception of perspective and attempts to base the exactness of the representation on bound rays of light. For Goodman the linguistic connotation of the perceived leads to the denotation of the represented, which for him is also linguistically—meaning symbolically/conventionally and/or in terms of definition—fixed. Goodman does not see a scale of realism in representation based either on the level of illusion or the chance that one might confuse the representation with the represented. This view could be considered advantageous as it also allows for the representation of fictive elements (such as unicorns), but this would in the end only test the trickiness and the pervasiveness of the relevant language of symbols. “Just here, I think, lies the touchstone of realism: not in quantity of information but in how easily it issues. And this depends upon how stereotyped the mode of representation is, upon how commonplace the labels and their uses have become. Realism is relative, determined by the system of representation standard for a given culture or person at a given time.”#22# Here we can see the fundamental difference between Goodman’s approach and that of Foucault: Goodman does not accept a fundamental break in modernity when it comes to categorical systems of representation, but instead only sees a continuous and culturally-based change in styles, meaning the categories of interests and labels that the original allows to step forward. The concept of fixation, be it by means of non-representational abstraction or a presentation of the object itself (as in the case of ready-mades), is absurd according to this notion. Perhaps what comes closest to fixation in Goodman’s argument is his term “exemplification,” for which the word “red” written in red letters or a tailor’s pattern could serve as an example. References are made to some (but not all) characteristics, and these are simultaneously shown in the form of a symbol. Exemplification is Goodman’s term for ownership and reference. What is important, however, is that it is not a complete symbol, but a display of certain defining characteristics that are denoted using symbols and whose logical interrelations can also be shown, be it by means of notational systems, such as musical scores or diagrams, or maps, such as the “” made by inhabitants of the Marshall Islands displayed here. Goodman uses this map, in which shells represent islands and bamboo rods stand for winds and currents, to illustrate the fact that—according to his concept of conventions—anything can be used to represent something else.

According to this view, paintings and are also notational or symbolic systems—the only difference being the degree to which something is not represented or denoted—and can even display characteristics such as expressivity. Thus, critics such as W.J.T. Mitchell come to the conclusion “that semiotics, the very field which claims to be a ‘general science of signs,’ encounters special difficulties when it tries to describe the nature of images and the difference between texts and images.”#23#

In defining vocabulary—meaning the admissible rows of symbols and rules of conversion that lead to formal languages and mathematical calculations—conventionalism not only finds its fiercest and most binding formulation, but it also establishes a more mathematically exact, more logically concise idea of reference that includes classification (functions). In this relationship between symbol and similarity, it is interesting to note that relationships or forms do not have to limit themselves to their appearance. In their introduction to Gödel’s , Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman introduce the Theorem of Pappus and its dual analogy to underscore the notion of mathematical representation. For our purposes, this discussion beautifully illustrates how the logical relationships (with set symbolic meanings) can appear rather different.

“Figure 3 (a) illustrates the Theorem of Pappus: If A, B, C are any three distinct points in a line I, and A’, B’, C’ any three distinct points on another line II, the three points R, S, T determined by the pairs of lines AB’ and A’B, BC’ and B’C, CA’ and C’A, respectively, are collinear (i.e., lie on line III). Figure 3 (b) illustrates the ‘dual’ of the above theorem: If A, B, C are any three distinct lines on a point I, and A’, B’, C’ any three distinct lines on point I, and A’, B’, C’ any three distinct lines on another point II, the three lines R, S, T determined by the pair of points AB’ and A’B, BC’ and B’C, CA’ and C’A, respectively, are copunctual (i.e., lie on point III). The two figures have the same abstract structure, though in appearance they are markedly different.”#24# For the untrained eye, these two abstract structures are not so easy to differentiate, but my simple thesis is easy to understand: When, according to Goodman’s conventionalist theory, everything can represent everything else (here points for lines and lines for points), then this means only logical relationships are taken into consideration, and this clearly has visible effects in terms of appearance and similarity. Likewise, it is not only because of onomatopoeias that language itself has been introduced to new references by the utopias of and the dialectics of rhetoric that are closer to the mirror image in terms of structural similarity—a concrete realization—of that which is at issue than conventionalists would like to believe. In his Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno formulated this notion quite impressively in his criticism of : “Yet we cannot ignore the perpetual denunciation of rhetoric by nominalists to whom a name bears no resemblance to what it says, nor can an unbroken rhetoric be summoned against them. Dialectics—literally: language as the organon of thought—would mean to attempt a critical rescue of the rhetorical element, a mutual approximation of thing and expression, to the point where the difference fades. [...] It was this link that inspired phenomenology to try—naively, as always—to make sure of by analyzing words. It is in the rhetorical that culture, society, and tradition animate the thought; a stern hostility to it is leagued with barbarism, in which bourgeois thinking ends.”#25#

The missing artwork in the simulated museum as a reference to a book

On the one hand, Maurice Blanchot sees the museum as the place in which social functions (in religion and politics)—and thus life itself—are driven out of the individual artwork. On the other, the museum is also the place that can play the imaginary role that brands art a work of fiction. In light of this realization and taking into consideration advances in the means of reproduction, Blanchot— like Paul Valéry and Walter Benjamin before him—seeks a new understanding of art now that art has been made readily available thanks to new means of reproduction: “To recall it more quickly, La Musée imaginaire points first to this fact: that we are all familiar with the of all civilizations that devoted themselves to art. That we are familiar with them practically and comfortably, not with an ideal knowledge that would belong only to a few, but in a way that is real, living, and universal (reproductions). ... [T]hrough reproduction, art objects lose their scale; the miniature becomes a painting, the painting becomes separated from itself, fragmented, becomes another painting. Fictive arts? But art, it would seem, is this fiction.”#26# If the reproduction of artworks is seen in this light, then the same is true for all Hyperrealist methods. With his books of poetry made unreadable by their being set in plaster ( Pense-Bête , 1964), Marcel Broodthaers in his art museum project referred to Foucault’s discussion of René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe in his book of the same name. In doing so he addressed a completely new linguistic definition of art—namely, works of language as art, and not important works of art as language—which negates itself. Writing, an aspect of language, seems to have lost its conventional referential system: “This new form of objectification occurred when he embedded the remaining copies of the edition in a plaster base, thus adding to the process of semantic destruction by preventing the book from being opened and read at all. The extent to which the semantic and lexical dimension of poetry is annihilated paradoxically increases the plasticity and presence of the artifact.”#27# The reference to Foucault’s book as the equivalent of Magritte’s museum lends the book this semantic dimension. It makes it readable again, almost as if by referring to the painter Broodthaers wished to take back his own initial artistic act. By referring to Foucault’s book, he places it among physical space and at the same time demands that we read it. Yet Foucault’s book—based on Magritte’s drawing that adds to the original an additional frame and a second pipe floating in space—deals precisely with the difference between object, form, and denotation. It is about the interwoven relationship of reality, reproduction, and language. “What is essential is that the verbal signs and visual representations are never given at once. An order always hierarchizes them, running from the figure to discourse or from discourse to the figure. [...] The second principle that long ruled painting posits an equivalence between the fact of resemblance and the affirmation of a representative bond. Let a figure resemble an object (or some other figure), and that alone is enough for there to slip into the pure play of the painting a statement—obvious, banal, repeated a thousand times yet almost always silent. [...] ‘What you see is that.’ No matter, again, in what sense the representative relation is posed—whether the painting is referred to the visible world around it, or whether it independently establishes an invisible world that resembles itself.”#28# If these principles, these categorical hierarchies, are broken, then the symbolic systems and, thus, the references enter into the equation. They become ambivalent, and it is no longer clear what is representing what. In Magritte’s drawing, the attempt to go beyond the drawing and to equate a confusion of the references and identifications is dealt with in terms of negation. Foucault goes through all of the possible declinations of the by circling bits of the words and images in the drawing. He believes his theory of the ability to dissolve the underlying image syntax is confirmed by the serial works of Pop art. Not only these series, but also the iconography of the comic book—removed from the syntax of the storyboard and robbed of all narrative—appear to verify the theory. But the reproductions of the Hyperrealists apply the technique at an earlier stage. The game begins with the transfer of the original to the painting, and the status of the symbolic system thus remains undetermined. Despite photographic and other reproducible originals, the Hyperrealists—as opposed to photographic artists—reexamine the very nature of technical reproducibility. It is almost as if they wish to win back something of its aura. As Walter Benjamin stated, this is a conscious act committed against the “simultaneous collective reception”—something he believes painting can never be. Images and symbols appear as if they had been cleansed—isolated from their functions—while the notion of serial reproduction is replaced with an almost contemplative act of painted reproduction. The original, be it a found object or an example of photographic indexicality, leaves open to question whether there is something outside—something relating to a pre-structured reality in the transformational space between original and Hyperrealist reproduction. A more hopeful term for this genre would be capable of describing the empty spaces in the representation, although it is normally precisely these spaces that are responsible for determining the very genre.

1 1 Jacques Lacan, in: Mladan Dolar (ed.), Short Circuits. A Voice of nothing and more (MIT Press, 2006): 197. 2 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form

3 Paul Feyerabend, Wissenschaft als Kunst (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984): 17 ff. 4 Ibid:. 23. 5 Jonathan Crary, “Modernizing Vision,” in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995): 25 ff. 6 Ibid: 26 ff. 7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1991): 6–7. 8 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 1. As an example of just how relevant the map remains as a paradigm, see vol. 202, the May–June “Fiktion der Kunst der Fiktion” issue of Kunstforum “Das Ganze scheint realer als seine fiktiven Teile: Kartografische Arbeiten von Wim Delvoye, Michael Müller und Susanne Weirich,” 132. 9 Claude Lebenstzeijn, Malcolm Morley: Itineraries (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2001): 47. 10 Harald Szeemann, et al. (eds.) documenta 5, Catalogue (Kassel: documenta GmbH, 1972): tab 15. 11 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1986): 196 ff. 12 Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a in: Clive Cazeaux, The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London: Routledge, 2000): 527. 13 Hal Foster, “The Real Thing,” in Cindy Sherman, exhib. cat. (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 1996): 80 ff. 14 Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a in: Cazeaux The Continental Aesthetics Reader (London: Routledge, 2000): 536. 15 Ibid: 535. 16 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1996): 152. 17 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2008): 7. 18 Fried seizes upon the theory of the French art critic Jean-Francois Chevrier, who believes these works mark the beginning of art photography. 19 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 77. 20 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Hackett Publishing, 1976): 5–7. 21 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form